Starting Early
Posted on January 30, 2014 by debmeier
From the Alliance on Childhood:
“An Australian newspaper reports that the countries that did best in the much-respected PISA test started formal teaching at 6 or 7, not 5 as we increasingly do in the U.S. The article quotes David Whitebread, a Cambridge University expert in the cognitive development of young children, saying ‘overwhelming evidence suggests that 5 is just too young to start formal learning.’ He adds that children should be engaged in informal play-based learning until about age 7.”
Worth considering–but in fact most nations do have activities for younger children that they purposely don’t call school. That’s why I wish we hadn’t gotten into the habit of calling it “pre-school”. Kindergarten actually just means a kind garden. It has now become or becoming first grade. So I guess pre-K could maybe be our last chance to build-in the kind of playfulness that all schools should later honor.
And on another form of gobbledeegook language
“It’s important that we teach thew 21st Century skills of critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving.”
The quote above is just one of many like it that I run across daily in the literature of